MDL News & Trends

Novel Infrared Focal Plane Array Deliveries

In 2011, the Infrared Photonics group of MDL delivered a two-color megapixel quantum-well infrared photodetector (QWIP) focal plane array (FPA) to the Hyperspectral Thermal Emission Spectrometer (HyTES) instrument, funded by the NASA Instrument Incubator Program. This novel two-color FPA consists of eight different progressively changing gratings monolithically integrated to optimize the light coupling into the QWIP pixels receiving light at different frequencies from the spectrometer.

MDL also delivered a 320x256 and 640x512 pixel first high-operating-temperature (HOT) mid-wave infrared (MWIR) barrier infrared detector (BIRD) FPA, as well as a video graphics array (VGA) format HOT MWIR BIRD FPA, to the U.S. Army. These unique infrared FPAs were all designed and fabricated using MDL’s state-of-the-art equipment.